Word order Shoes two blue or shoes blue two: which phrase makes more sense?

Certain grammatical rules may be hardwired into our brains so we have an instinctive sense of how certain types of words should be grouped together, no matter what language we speak, a new study suggests.

The study revealed that volunteers taught a fake language based on English words automatically arranged noun, adjectives and numbers in the same order — an order that is common to the majority of known languages.

"We designed a fake language so the language uses English words … but we ordered them in a funny way such that you get a noun like 'shoes' first before an adjective like 'blue' — the opposite that you would get in English," says Culbertson.

The English-speaking volunteers heard phrases in which a noun was followed by an adjective, such as 'shoes blue', and phrases in which a noun was followed by a number, for example, 'shoes two'.

Then they were asked to guess the order of words when the phrase contained a noun and both the adjective and the number, even though they had not been taught the language rule for that particular situation.

Grammar rules

In English, the number comes before the adjective for example: 'two blue shoes'. So even when the order is reversed, as in the fake language, you would expect that rule would still apply to create the phrase: 'shoes two blue'.

Instead, researchers were surprised to discover the volunteers guessed the opposite approach for the made-up language, choosing the order: 'shoes blue two'.

"It turns out when the modifiers come after the noun, they're very unlikely to come in the same order as English," Culbertson says.

"Because of the way semantics work, you combine things like adjectives more closely with the noun so they modify things that are relevant to the noun like properties such as colour, shape or size. So [adjectives] should come closer to the noun than other things like numbers."

This arranging of adjectives closest to the noun is common across a majority of known languages, with the exception of some African languages such as Kikuyu where the noun is followed by the number word and then the adjective. However, there are no known languages where the structure is 'adjective, number, noun'.

"I think it shows that there are these deeper organising principles of language that we can't necessarily see on the surface, but they come out for example when you're learning new language," Culbertson says.

The fact that this rule is not taught suggests there is more to learning a language than just learning the linear order of the words.

"There are these hidden things that child learners have to pick up and you could teach them, but more interesting would be if they came to the table with … their default assumption that this is the way the language will work."

Culbertson says the next step is to try to replicate these findings with non-English speaking volunteers.

"For example, Thai has the order where you get something like 'shoes blue two' and we want to see if the same thing happens when people who have that pattern as their native pattern are exposed to one where some of those words come before the noun," says Culbertson.